While Judith Butler's contributions to feminist thought and queer theory have been widely acknowledged, the significance of her thought for the field of political theory has yet to be fully explored. This dissertation explores how Butler's theories of gender performativity and subjectivation could contribute to current theoretical understandings of three important topics within political theory: race, recognition, and the politics of education. First, this dissertation elaborates a theory of race performativity. It contends that this account of race performativity expands Butler's own framework for analyzing how subjects are produced and differentiated from one another, and that this account also advances current theoretical understandings of race by conceptualizing race as an ongoing, reiterative process and drawing attention to the crucial role that linguistic practices play in the normative production of race.

This dissertation then uses these performative understandings of gender and race, as well as the notion of the subject that underlies them, to resolve problems that are commonly associated with normative theories of recognition, particularly those that are grounded in multiculturalist understandings of difference. However, rather than simply revising existing theories of recognition, this dissertation develops a Butlerian approach to recognition and defends it against current theories of recognition such as those put forth by Charles Taylor and Nancy Fraser. Finally, to draw out the normative implications of this Butlerian approach, this dissertation considers how the goals and aims of this approach could be advanced through education. In doing so, it reveals many of the weaknesses that plague liberal multicultural approaches to difference in education and shows how these limitations might be overcome.