Heterosyncrasy as a Way of Life: Disability and the Heterosyncratic Community in Amis and Amiloun

The fourteenth-century Amis and Amiloun emphasizes the oath of fidelity between two nearly identical male friends. Their ‘queer’ relationship is compounded by the diverse and pleasurable alliances they share with others, including Belisaunt and Amoraunt, thus making their relationships more akin to Karma Lochrie’s heterosyncratic than modern notions of queerness. Amiloun’s disabled body serves as the crux that forges these alliances, demonstrating that heterosyncrasy depends upon disability. Despite the poem’s tragic end, which at first glance appears to ‘prostheticize’ the deviances produced by the text’s non-normative bodies and unions, Amis and Amiloun aligns the queer/disabled with a pleasurable excess that promises a world-making both within and without the text that positions the heterosyncratic community as a valued and valuable way of life for people of all genders, sexualities, and abilities.