Jane Chin Davidson reviews two books on performance art, Jane Blocker's What the body cost: desire, history, and performance, and Meiling Cheng's In other Los Angeleses: multicentric performance art. Blocker uses the example of a series of works by Vito Acconci and Kathy Dillon titled Conversions in attempt to prove her doubts about performance body art's potential to challenge the domination of the male gaze and heterosexual masculine subjectivity. Davidson argues that Blocker's exclusive focus on the photographic record of performance art as a static image and her nostalgic retrieval of feminist unity which frames the modernist-versus-bourgeois-art debate are narrow and inadequate. Cheng, on the other hand, approaches performance art through the lens of the politics of difference which attempts to transform the reductive language of multiculturalism and refuses to define multicentricity as the binary opposite of the Eurocentricity.