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In spite of the growing acceptability of the works of women novelists in Iran, literary criticism of these works suffers from significant shortcomings and limitations. The most prominent of these shortcomings is the critics’ lack of interest in separately analyzing each novel as a distinct literary unit in order to appreciate its singular literary excellence and uncover those aspects that are less likely to appear in the literature of men. Above all, feminist literary criticism of Iranian novels lacks an approach to focus on the notion of femininity as an indispensible part of the narration that can offer new literary potentials both for the writer and the reader. The present study uses concepts from poststructuralist psychoanalysis, especially Lacan’s theories of mirror stage and femininity as pretense and Irigaray’s theories regarding mimesis, difference and the development of the feminine subject, to discuss the function of game playing in Belgheis Soleimani’s novel, The Last Game of the Lady. Golbanoo, the protagonist, through her games and theatricality, manages to take what Irigaray believes to be the first step in challenging the phallocentric discourse: the strategy of subversive mimesis of that discourse to open a space for a new definition of femininity that allows for the development of the female subject. Her last game, which is the game of the narrative, is in fact the beginning of her victory. Golbanoo and the novelist join forces to playfully crack the phallocentric mindset and achieve feminine subjectivity by means of creative production.

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This study aims to investigate the binary oppositions existing in the novels of Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga. As Hellen Cixous and Luce Irigaray, two French feminists argue, gender binaries are designed in a way that women are always placed at a lower position than men. Desai and Adiga’s novels are chosen for this study because they are from a new generation of Indian writers and their booker prize winner novels suggest their popularity and prominence in Indian English literature. Choosing a male and female writer provides the opportunity to compare the works of authors of each sex as well. Finding the patriarchal binaries existing in the novels and highlighting the parts where these structures are broken by each writer based on Cixous's theory is the first step in analyzing the novels. Then comparing how the authors posited female characters in relation to the male ones is the second step taken in this analytical study. This study applies thematic analysis on two novels i.e. The White Tiger and Selection Day by Aravind Adiga and The Inheritance of Loss and Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai. Based on the findings, Desai and Adiga both suggested the existing binaries; however, Desai did it with detailed depiction of characters and relations while Adiga had a more comprehensive way to show the issues related to women and were considered so peripheral that did not worth depicting.