Out from underground: The discourse of emerging fugitives

Jane Alpert, Bernardine Dohrn, Abbie Hoffman, and Cathlyn Wilkerson were among a handful of fugitives who went underground in the 1970s to avoid fines and imprisonment stemming from protest activities. In emerging from underground, these fugitives faced dramatic role passages that they handled discursively by employing two pairs of paradoxical strategies—integration/differentiation and deviance/respectability—that they did not attempt to resolve. The first construct in each pair managed the self‐image of the fugitive; the second functioned to accommodate societal expectations. I suggest that the maintenance of paradox allowed the fugitives to present ambiguous identities and thus to achieve a balance between consistency and accommodation that may prove to be the organizing principle of any discourse that accompanies dramatic role shifts.