Among the epigraphs in Flash Count Diary, Darcey Steinke’s incandescent account of the menopause, is a line from The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir: “The body is not a thing but a situation.” Steinke is being assailed, even menaced by hot flushes. They come with a warning: first an aura, a vertigo-inducing plunge into anxiety, then an explosion of heat. They hit her at work, in bed, bringing insomnia and depression in their wake. They can be generated by the smallest shift in temperature – a plate of scrambled eggs placed too close to her stomach, the door closing on a bus. Lying on her sofa in Brooklyn, “a slab of frozen ham balanced on my forehead”, she recognises that she has become the butt of a cultural joke: the menopausal woman, out of oestrogen, evolutionary roadkill.

In Feminine Forever, the 1966 book that kickstarted the popularity of HRT, she finds post-menopausal women described as “castrates” with pathologically dry vaginas. Half a century on, not much has changed. At the 11th European Conference on Menopause and Andropause in Amsterdam, she watches a video about laser treatment to sandblast the menopausal vagina, accompanied by an animation that shows a withered brown rose transform into a tight pink bud. As an Italian doctor dismisses a nurse’s concerns about the breast cancer risk of HRT, she realises “all his descriptions explain how the vagina might feel to an incoming penis”. Is the problem really her body, this ageing animal thing, or a cultural situation that insists women’s value is predominantly sexual or reproductive? And what is the word for this situation? Could it be patriarchy?

Patriarchy as a concept was long out of fashion. As Katherine Angel explains in Daddy Issues, her smart, thoughtful essay about the cultural place of fathers in the #MeToo age, it was sunk alongside the corpse of second-wave feminism. “The nineties – decade of girl power, and of an insistence on women’s economic and social freedom, on the condition that women themselves abandon a critique of gender relations – gave invocations of patriarchy, as it gave feminism, a fusty feel, an old-fashioned whiff, conjuring all the age-old stereotypes of feminism: joylessness, sexlessness, uptightness.”

Nothing embodies these stereotypes more than the monumental, dungareed figure of Andrea Dworkin, whose alliance with the religious right over the censorship of pornography dealt radical feminism a body blow. Now she too has been brought back into circulation with the timely publication of Last Days at Hot Slit, a selection of her writings that makes a powerful case for her complexity, wit, stylistic originality and political relevance in the grab-’em-by-the-pussy era. Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein: none of it would have surprised Dworkin. “Our enemies – rapists and their defenders – not only go unpunished; they remain influential arbiters of morality; they have high and esteemed places in society; they are priests, lawyers, judges, lawmakers, politicians, doctors, artists.”

The body’s situation was her prime territory. Her first husband battered her nearly to death before she escaped him, and her experience of being “just some bleeding thing cut up on the floor” drove all her work. How do you convey the systemisation of violence against women when there is a conspiracy of silence around it, when it is so tolerated and disseminated and sustained as to have merged with the fabric of ordinary reality?

Dworkin’s decision, and the reason her writing remains so pungent and uncanny, was to amplify. To go hard. To find a language “more terrifying than rape, more abject than torture, more insistent and destabilising than battery, more desolate than prostitution, more invasive than incest, more filled with threat and aggression than pornography”. Though there’s plenty of material here that’s dated, hyperbolic or plain wrong-headed (like Johanna Fateman, the co-editor of this collection, I’ve often occupied the opposite position to Dworkin, particularly on issues of censorship and sexual freedom), her arguments are more nuanced than the caricatures perpetuated today. Then there’s her weird, electric style. “I want his boot off my neck.” “Carnivorous in its use of women.” “There are no innocent bystanders.” She wrote in 1995: “I have always loved the writing that takes one deep, no matter how strange or bitter or dirty the descent.”

Her own eyes had been opened by the publication in 1970 of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, a revolutionary analysis of sexual dynamics in literature, which painstakingly revealed that the superstructure of patriarchy was by no means confined to economics or the law, but permeated to the furthest reaches of the culture, infiltrating and informing the domestic and erotic. Nearly 50 years on, it’s both gratifying and troubling that the same technique is still in use, deployed liberally by Steinke and Angel in books that have returned to the contested ground, if not the tone, of radical feminism. Angel assesses fathers in Sally Potter’s film Ginger & Rosa, Radio 4’s The Archers and Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall: narcissistic, self-involved, violently possessive. Both Steinke and Dworkin linger over The Story of O, Dworkin as evidence that men regard women primarily as a zero, a hole – Steinke in regretful post-post-feminist reverie about the erotic charge that submitting to this particular fantasy of abasement could induce.

Patriarchy is a totalitarian system. How do you dodge conscription, or evade its all-seeing gaze? Angel, encountering Anthea Hamilton’s exhibition The Squash at Tate Britain, takes pleasure in the “deliciously genderless” nature of the creature – the performer in the squash-like costume. It has no eyes, or even a true face, but the “beautiful, bulbous, obscene” head nevertheless seems to turn and take her in. What a relief to have an encounter in which gender plays no part. On a whale-watching trip, Steinke likewise experiences a “dilation” of her sense of self when she’s miraculously eyed by Granny, the post-reproductive matriarch who leads three pods of killer whales in the Pacific.

Animals are a way of thinking about the “thingness” of bodily existence without getting tangled up in the situations of human politics and culture. Androgyny, too, offers a way of refusing assigned and harmful gender roles. Catching a glimpse of herself in a window, Steinke first sees an old man and relishes the ungendering of age, the falling away of her visual identity as a woman. Reading trans memoirs by Juliet Jacques and Max Wolf Valerio, she luxuriates in a sense of gender as fluid, a hormonal tide between two poles, along which we all bob and drift, sometimes making drastic crossings and sometimes remaining tethered in place (being a white, cis, middle-class woman no doubt makes those crossings more alluring and less perilous than they actually are). Dworkin, too, advocates the destruction of the essentialist gender binary, writing in a utopian flourish: “Androgyny … may be the one road to freedom open to women, men, and that emerging majority, the rest of us.”

The family tends to be where gender roles are inculcated and maintained, and both Dworkin and Steinke fret in particular over their mothers, the enforcers of impossible standards of beauty and behaviour. Dworkin’s mother, Sylvia, could not brook conflict and regarded independent thought as sinister revolt. Dworkin believed that stopping loving her was among the greatest achievements of her life. Steinke, awake night after night in the furnace of flushes, goes to work on the memory of her dead mother like a burying beetle. She remembers that on their final evening together, her mother pulled out a picture of Steinke aged 49, getting married for the second time. She wore a pink dress, and, though underneath she had on a thick beige bodysuit and control-top tights, her mother swears that in the photograph her pubic hair is showing. Shame: passed between women down generations, a technique of control that brings no more pleasure to the enforcer than the recipient.

These stories matter, both to the individual who experienced them and as cultural tendencies, but I can’t help wondering whether the logic of exposure might not be quite as powerful as Dworkin hoped back in 1973, the year her first book, Woman Hating, was published. What is the point of revealing the embedded presence of patriarchal ideology (another lost word) in books and family histories when an undisguised misogynist is the president of the US, and abortion rights, one of the first victories of second-wave feminism, are being obliterated? As Angel says, the telling of stories held so dear by the #MeToo movement, the desire to call out injustice, might actually reinforce what it seeks to pull down, since “the evidence of swaggering cruelty may both gratify and solidify the fantasy of dominance”.

This doesn’t mean there’s no point in writing. Writing the self, Angel observes, is not just to do with catharsis or narcissistic revelation. It’s a route towards individuation: the process of encapsulating what the self is, and of expelling what it’s not. Drawing on Jacques Lacan and on Donald Winnicott (whose relative freedom from misogyny has made him a linchpin in contemporary autotheory, from Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother to Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts), she describes the mirror stage of psychoanalysis, the process by which the infant gains a sense of itself as separate through the mirror of the parent’s gaze. If the child is rejected, if their affection is coerced, if their aggression is forbidden, then the child will be trapped in a false self. But if the parent can withstand the child’s aggression and remain undestroyed, then the infant will have the immeasurable gift of feeling real. Not everyone will achieve this in childhood, but the work of writing offers a second chance.

Maybe feeling real sounds like a luxury. It’s not. As a battered wife, Dworkin was hit with an iron bar, burned with cigarettes, punched in the breasts, her head smashed repeatedly into a concrete floor, but the worst thing she experienced was the isolation of being disbelieved, of being unable to convince anyone – friends, family, neighbours, police, doctors – to help. That was the nadir: “the pure and consuming madness of being invisible and unreal”.

In the activist tradition from which Dworkin hails, writing an experience down is a way of reclaiming reality. Making something visible – rape, domestic violence, racism, misogyny – is the precursor to action, since if these things cannot be seen and, crucially, realised as shared, communal, and therefore political, then they are not available for transformation. Writing is the first step to political change. “I want writers to write books as actions,” she declared in Woman Hating. A generation on, Steinke too explicitly frames writing as resistance: “I wanted to fight back, resist how the culture stigmatises and denigrates menopausal women.”

If hope of change is what drove Dworkin’s crusade, one of the most distressing aspects of Hot Slit is how she came to lose her faith. She had been raped many times. For a decade she gave a speech called “Rape Atrocity”, and for a decade women came up to her afterwards and told her what had happened to them: in an alley, asleep in bed, in a factory, a stockroom, a school, until she could no longer bear it and stopped giving the speech. And then in 1999, at the age of 52, she was raped again in a hotel room in Paris, only this time a date-rape drug was used and she had no recollection of the attack, just artefacts: a bruise on her breast, a bloody gouge on her thigh. She wrote about it in the New Statesman and many people did not believe her. In many ways, it was the nail in the coffin of her reputation.

After her death of myocarditis in 2005, a 24,000-word document on her computer called “My Suicide” was found and part of it is republished here for the first time. In it, she wrote down what this abiding unreality had cost her. Her whole model of political change depended on memory and witness testimony. Without it, she was sunk. She described the death of her optimism, the nightly dreams that the husband she hadn’t seen in decades was going to kill her, that she was once again and permanently a prisoner of his brutality. The now of trauma, the impossibility of there ever being anything other than this encompassing, annihilating reality.

This is what was in her mind in her final years: total desperation. Thinking that every person was like a lake with a beautiful surface, only once you went down into it, it was slimy and evil. Every person. She remembers hurting her dog and hates herself. She writes: “How could anyone be so stupid and so mean?” This was the woman who had studied human violence and degradation all her life, in the fierce belief that shining a light on it would bring about change, who had said of herself as an exuberant child, assaulted for the first time at nine: “I wanted to touch everything and do everything. This was my optimism … It’s a refusal to be afraid of life. Girls aren’t supposed to have it.”

• Flash Count Diary: A New Story About the Menopause by Darcey Steinke is published by Canongate (RRP £16.99). Daddy Issues by Katherine Angel is published by Peninsula Press (RRP £6). To order copies go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder is available from MIT Press (RRP £13.99).