How did space shape the ways people perceived and used their bodies in modern urban life? This panel addresses this question by examining three crucial and interrelated sites in twentieth-century cities: public toilets, bathing and swimming pools, and retail dressing rooms. Despite their distinctive functions, these sites were all everyday public spaces where human bodies were frequently exposed. They therefore embodied persistent tensions between spatial visibility and bodily privacy. Starting from this commonality, the panel explores how these sites mediated historical agents’ bodily practices, sensory experiences, and norms of propriety and privacy. Paying attention to architectural designs and visual representations, the panelists investigate how different historical agents used their bodies to perform fundamental routines of excreting, bathing, and changing clothes in these sites. They pay particular attention to how the spaces’ material configurations mediated these practices and ideas of such practices. Bringing together approaches from history, urban studies, architecture, geography, and digital humanities, the panel demonstrates interdisciplinary methods for studying spatial history, the history of the body, and the history of everyday life.

The panelists bring thematically united and geographically comparative perspectives to the topic. Xincheng Hou’s research focuses on public toilets in Republican China (1911-49). Analyzing building blueprints alongside a digital 3D reconstruction of the toilets created for this study, it examines how the buildings’ architecture and automatic devices could render different forms of filth imperceptible to users and shape people’s ideas of hygiene, privacy, and the body. It also showcases how construction difficulties, maintenance problems, and users’ practices in these sites made this spatial control of filth and the body practically unachievable.

Naomi Adiv’s work analyzes bathhouses and swimming pools in New York City, using gender as a key lens to explore the ways bodily conduct was unevenly regulated in these sites. Drawing on governmental documents and journalistic writings, it examines how gender norms shaped the appropriate movements, presentations, and interactions of bodies under exposure. Meanwhile, it further situates these norms within the persistent risk of sexual harassment, demonstrating how public pools were simultaneously promoted as sites of recreation while being experienced as spaces of vulnerability.

Finally, Louisa Iarocci’s research examines retail dressing rooms in the early twentieth-century U.S. cities. Drawing on these rooms’ architectural plans, design manuals, and popular images, it analyzes how their arrangements, furniture, and decor mediated the sensorial interaction between space and users’ bodily practices, especially seeing and touching, while getting dressed. It also examines how these spatial features influenced the shoppers’ ideas of class and privacy.

Altogether, by placing toilets, pools, and dressing rooms in dialogue, the panel emphasizes the centrality of everyday spaces in mediating historical agents’ norms of privacy, bodily practices, and experiences of daily lives.