This paper argues that governance, not inscription, is the correct model of authorship for disabled scholars with communicative disabilities, with implications for disabled scholars whose expressive continuity is disrupted by disability more broadly. Drawing on Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and Foucault’s author-function, it establishes that meaning precedes and exceeds the act of inscription, and that authorship consists in the governance of meaning rather than its physical production. It then argues that the inscription model — academic culture’s de facto standard — constitutes testimonial foreclosure: a structural condition in which disabled knowers are excluded from epistemic participation before any evaluation of their knowledge occurs. The paper introduces crip accumulation as a seventh interpretation of crip time, describing how conceptual structures thicken during periods of expressive silence imposed by the inscription model. Together these concepts name what the inscription model does and what it destroys. The paper concludes by confronting common objections and arguing that none refute the governance model — they reproduce it. The argument is grounded in the author’s lived experience of aphasia following brain surgery in 2014 and in a decade of scholarly silence that the governance model corrects.
