Ochs And Taylor Gender Roles

5. What are the six roles that Ochs and Taylor outline?How are they distributed across family dinnertime narratives and the people who participate in them? What does this tell us about gender and language more generally?

To better illustrate dinnertime in middle-class European American families Ocha and Taylor laid out different roles that occur at dinnertime.The roles that were addressed and illustrated were the protagonist, introducer, primary recipient, problematizer, and problematizee. Upon narrating an event or story of an event that occurred the main character of the narrative was the protagonist. The protagonist and their actions are put into the spotlight for the rest of the family to react and give their thoughts to. The introducer

The foundation they use is of a darker shade so that they can emphasize their Mexican ethnicity. The way they do the rest of their makeup including, hair, lipstick, eyeliner signal which gang they are a part of (53). Other factors include what music they listen to, what football team they support, and the main colors they wear in their outfits. These were the tools they used to differentiate themselves and create their identities. At the start of this article Mendoza-Denton references a show that was done with Geraldo Rivera where cholas came out wearing baggy clothes, pleated khaki pants, wool jackets, and very dark makeup (47). The girls were said to be very unfeminine and were given a makeover so that they could look more feminine and “normal”. And upon coming out, they were changed into shorter skirts and jackets, given heels, and they hair and makeup changed to lighter makeup and curled hair. This difference in the way they presented themselves elicited approval from the audience and Geraldo Rivera, while the girls were more

In the audience 's’ points of view they were unattractive but this is one set of people. If they were attractive according to them it did not guarantee that they were attractive to others outside of the audience. The things that the cholas did to themselves pertaining to their appearance is what made them the people they wanted to be. Their style elicited their race, ethnicity, class, and gender. It showed intersectionality in their lives and this is how they used their technology of femininity to cater to how they themselves wanted to be presented, and not how they “should” be representing