No matter what colour the traffic lights glow.

You often find traffic lights at intersections.

Intersections are also used as a methaphor in the analytical framework of Intersectionality for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. The term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage. Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, physical appearance,and height.These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing.

Empowerment is the degree of autonomy and self-determination in people and in communities. This enables them to represent their interests in a responsible and self-determined way, acting on their own authority. It is the process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one's life and claiming one's rights. Empowerment as action refers both to the process of self-empowerment and to professional support of people, which enables them to overcome their sense of powerlessness and lack of influence, and to recognize and use their resources.

As a term, empowerment originates from American community psychology and is associated with the social scientist Julian Rappaport (1981). However, the roots of empowerment theory extend further into history and are linked to Marxist sociological theory. These sociological ideas have continued to be developed and refined through Neo-Marxist Theory (also known as Critical Theory).

Empowerment is the process of obtaining basic opportunities for marginalized people, either directly by those people, or through the help of non-marginalized others who share their own access to these opportunities. It also includes actively thwarting attempts to deny those opportunities. Empowerment also includes encouraging, and developing the skills for, self-sufficiency, with a focus on eliminating the future need for charity or welfare in the individuals of the group. This process can be difficult to start and to implement effectively.

One form of Empowerment, can be understood as creating visibility for realities of life that often remain unseen in our society.

For example many cities in germany try to make queer relationships visible on traffic lights. Magdeburg doesn’t have a „Vielfalts-Ampel“ (ger. ‚Diversity-Traffic-Lights) yet. But there is a public discussion to implement one on the Street „Breiter Weg“.

Visibility of marginalised realities of life is very important to empower people and to increase and establish awareness in public spaces and society.

This cache was created as part of the German-Polish project "z.B. = np.” by young people from the KgKJH Sachsen-Anhalt e.V. and the Polish association KANZA. We thank the DPJW for funding.