On this year’s March 8th, the inhabitants of Karlsruhe, a city in Germany, were astonished by the amount of sanitary pads that were suddenly hanging in the city centre. And if they looked more closely at the sanitary products, they could read sentences on them like “imagine if men were as disgusted with rape as they are with periods”. Nineteen-year-old Elona Kastrati, who was a high-school graduate at the time, came up with the idea of covering the city with pads. She also uploaded photos of her action on her accounts on Instagram and Tumblr with the hash tag ‘#padsagainstsexism’. March 8th is the International Women’s Day, and Elona wanted to provoke the public with a feminist protest.
When she woke up the next day, she saw her posts – and her hashtag – being shared all over the world. “And on March 10, all my accounts on social media exploded: within that day, about 7000 people on Instagram, and about 4000 people on Tumblr, followed me,” Elona said with her blue-green eyes wide with incredulity. In the following month, she made headlines in leading media like the German Spiegel, the Huffington Post, and BuzzFeed. On May 29, she gave a speech at ‘TedxPrishtinaWomen’ about her feminist activism. According to Hana Marku, a Kosovan feminist journalist, Elona Kastrati is “the most kick-ass 19 year old” she knows.
Elona Kastrati. Photo via author.Elona has Kosovan-Albanian parents, who left Kosovo for Germany in 1994. Their daughter was born one year later in Malsch, a small town near Karlsruhe. She grew up in the nearby small city of Muggensturm. Non-Christian pupils at her primary school were permitted to not take religion class, and instead spend time on their own in the school building. At first, Elona attended Catholic class, but she explained that the teacher, a priest, didn’t pick her when she put her hand up, because of her Muslim background. So she decided to take no class instead.
