In Bellatin's Salón de belleza aquariums filled with exotic fish function as the symbolic nexus through which queer bodies and destructive power intersect and become involved in mutational processes. This article brings the novella into dialogue with biopolitical philosophy, queer theory and posthumanism in order to conceptualise the multivalent implications of the text's trans‐species reflections and crossings. My analysis moves beyond existing interpretations of the novella as a mournful account of the HIV/AIDS pandemic or as a text that documents violence more broadly, by calling attention to the more affirmative potentialities that are also latent in Bellatin's aesthetics of impersonality.